Tickets to see Durie are $30, and include a signed copy of the book and a photo op with Durie afterwards. A second guest ticket is $10 (but doesn’t include the book). Tagawa is giving $5 of each ticket sold to local charities helping “people and animals affected by Colorado’s wildfires this summer,” said a release from the store, which is encouraging advance purchases (303-690-4722 or TagawaGardens.com).

I love red, white and blue together and think it might actually be my favorite color combination of all time, which is saying a lot coming from a color junkie like me. Maybe it’s because I look terrific in all those of those colors?

I hate preachy cookbooks. If I wanted to be told what to eat, I’d go back 40 years in time and live with my parents. Even some of the gorgeous back-to-the-land, know-your-photogenic-farmer I-raised-this-goat-by-hand cookbooks out this year can strike a note of religious righteousness.

I don’t want a sermon. I just want some great food to keep me company when I break from my garden chores this weekend: cutting ornamental grass, tidying perennials, pruning roses, organizing my seeds …

Even if Dragonwagon’s name wasn’t already whimsical (a press release explains: 16-year-old hippie changes her name in the ’60s, then once she launches a writing career, kind of gets stuck with it) the book is damn fun.

With our landscapes turned to either mud-straw brown or glittering white, depending, I’ve been enjoying a literary time-trip to a place with the gift of good, rich soil and water that falls from the sky (though not always gently or in moderate quantities).

Anthology Book Co., the used/new bookstore/coffeehouse in my home town of Loveland, Colorado, puts its discriminating owners’ picks on display racks facing customers at The Coffee Tree, so they can peruse while they wait in line. There are always treasures in those racks. One of the recent ones was “My Vegetable Love,” by Carl H. Klaus, my writing professor from a couple of decades ago at the University of Iowa, and a painterly gardener. Carl had a potager before that word was common garden parlance, with the lettuces and broccoli and tomatoes and basil and peppers arranged to please the eye, as well as provide for his table. The book came out in the late ’90s and is still in print. (Find it at the University of Iowa Press Bur Oak Books.)

Carl’s daily journal from the year before he retired is sequenced from the plantings (and overwintered spinach harvest) in March to the last gleanings in November. I found it at Anthology also in November, when northern Colorado’s tortured trees had newly shrugged off that destructive October snow. When the dead seemed to outnumber the living in the plant world. I thought it would be interesting to read “My Vegetable Love” crosswise of the calendar, to remind me that March will come and that reticulated irises will rise again from my brown and tattered flower beds. To give me hope that my own tiny yard will finally sport the vegetable beds of my dreams, full of rich, black soil, in 2012.

If you haven’t encountered Carl’s prose before, you’re in for a treat. He was for many years the director of the University of Iowa’s literary nonfiction master’s program, and his book is full of his finely whetted sentences. He watches the weather, the plants, the birds, and life’s own meandering course. He is grounded very much in the day-to-day, and yet ruminates on a long and fruitful career. I couldn’t recommend a more peaceable, rewarding companion for the time when you can’t have your hands in the soil. (And after a good 20 years, I can still see his Einstein-esque eyebrows now, waggling at the first piece of writing I did that he thought was any good. When your writing earned his praise, it was always a sunny day).

Through the two recent blizzards, I’ve been riding light rail to work and enjoying “Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver,” by Diane Ott Whealy, my nose stuck deep into its ivory, photo-sprinkled pages.

"Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver," by Diane Ott Whealy

Seed-saving used to seem the high holy of garden geekdom, and even after a long how-to session at Abbondanza Organic Seeds & Produce, more trouble than I had time for. Then I tasted a tomato from a farmer’s market that I just had to have more of, and learned how easy it is to save tomato seeds because of how the plants pollinate. For many plants, though, it’s not easy to save seeds that you can be sure will produce another generation that’s like their parents.

But it is essential. If you’re reading this, you probably are hip to the world of flavor and variety in, say, an heirloom tomato. You might have even read one of Amy Goldman’s wonderful books on heirloom tomatoes, melons, or squash.

Heirloom vegetable seeds don’t just produce themselves. They have to be planted, kept pure, and then specially harvested and treated. The people who do this work are keeping history and tradition alive, preserving our food supply’s genetic diversity, and its beauty, and its flavor.

Today, if the varieties your grandparents and great-grandparents grew are available, you can get them in large part thanks to people like Diane Ott Whealy and Kent Whealy, who founded what was to grow into Seed Savers Exchange back in the 1970s, when her grandfather bequeathed some special morning glory and tomato seeds. (Kent, from Kansas, and Diane, from Iowa, actually met here in Colorado in Estes Park).

“Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver” tells the story of SSE’s genesis: 29 gardeners who sent 25 cents and a large envelope to the “True Seed Exchange” in northern Missouri. Those gardeners got a six-page publication listing seed other gardeners were willing to share. The year after that, the group was 142 people and the seed listing was rolled out on a mimeograph machine.

Soon after, Seed Savers Exchange established itself as a national non-profit. Since then, its membership has grown to more than 13,000; it has permanent grounds at Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa, with an orchard of hundreds of heirloom apple trees and rare-breed cattle. The annual yearbook, full of thousands of people willing to share heirloom seed, lands with a big “thup” in a mailbox, complete with seed descriptions and contact information. Maine gardening guru Eliot Coleman speaks at the farm’s annual campout.

It wasn’t easy. Diane Ott Whealy’s memoir, which reads like a story she’d tell you if you sat next to her at a big Iowa family reunion, is frank about what it took to build an institution that both she and her then-husband believed in, to the point of going without health insurance for themselves. They had day jobs and often night jobs for many years while devoting every spare moment to Seed Savers. The bean seeds — numbering in the thousands, that a collector entrusted to them — lived in their basement.

Their five children got tired of hearing them talk about seed saving. In fact, the couple envisioned Heritage Farm — a permanent place to anchor their mission — on a country drive when the kids had challenged them them not to bring up seeds the entire time. They had given this dream 15 years of their lives and all of their energy when, in 1990, Kent Whealy was given a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. It meant that they could, for the first time in their married lives, buy a safe car.

This is how it all happened: piles of letters on a desk; oak cases of bean seeds in their basement; farmers and gardeners sharing knowledge, stories, recipes. One farmer responded to a radio interview with Kent and Diane and wrote in to say he had seeds for a melon they’d been searching for. The melon was Moon & Stars, a beautiful, yellow-fleshed melon with a golden blob and smaller golden speckles. It’s that melon variety that Judith Ann Griffith illustrates on the book’s jacket, surrounded by its foliage, bedecked with a speckled Eastern tiger salamander.

It’s a beautiful book that’s both stylish and homey; a story of planting a seed, believing in its rightness, and giving it all that you have.

Since there’s snow coming to Colorado’s mountains now, I’m especially grateful that I got up to Estes Park last Friday to see some things in the gorgeous, golden light of autumn, which always seems that much more intense the higher you go. What follows is a random list of eye-catching things, from the high country and from my desk.

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Cleome, or spider flower, in downtown Estes Park

1. Cleome – a.k.a. spider flower – this giant stand of it, with stalks as big around as my thumb and blossoms that came up to my chin, taking people’s eyes off the parking lot for a resort.

It swept in Wednesday and stayed around through early Thursday morning, left a lovely reminder of itself in a Friday fog, just enough to linger in the hollows, not enough to snarl my commute.

I came out Friday morning to find my mesclun well-muscled, my chard seedlings charged, my broccoli raab looking like it might someday make a me a meal instead of just thinnings to crunch while weeding.

And look, look: bright little marble sized tomatoes, fully ripened on the two patio plants I’d just about given up on, hankering to take over their pots for more lettuce. (If your produce is pumped on last week’s rain, whip out your digital camera and show it off here. You could win a great edible gardening book!)

Let’s not be thinking about the fact that the rain will nurture weed seeds as well as grass seeds, thistles as well as thyme. Let’s roll over and wallow in the fact that, while it’s falling, we shouldn’t really be out there weed-whacking or fertilizing or, duh, watering (and yes, on a walk last Wednesday night in my subdivision, I saw automatic sprinklers going full blast in the greenbelt). We should snuggle deeper into the blankets and plan and plot and ponder.

Becky Hensley is the co-founder of Share Denver - a community craft space in Park Hill. She's also the proud Ninja-in Chief of the Denver Craft Ninjas -- a women’s crafting collective dedicated to keeping the DIY spirit alive through laughter, shared skills, and cocktails.

Colorado native Mark Montano is an international designer, artist, author and television personality. He has appeared on TLC’s “While You Were Out” and “10 Years Younger,” as well as “My Celebrity Home” on the Style Network, “She’s Moving In” on We TV, “The Tony Danza Show” on ABC, and “My Home 2.0” on Fox.